Modern Love: Romance, intimacy, and the marriage crisis

Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis

Volumn , Issue , 2003, Pages 1-268

  Shumway, David ^a  

^a CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84900214912     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (314)

1. John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationship(New York: HarperCollins, 1992), was USA Today's number one best-seller for the years 1994-1998. "John Gray Atop Our List of 100," USA Today, Feb. 11, 1999, 5D.
2. See Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution (1970; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1972);
3. Juliet Mitchell, Women:The Longest Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1984);
4. Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
5. See Jo Loudin, The Hoax of Romance (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1981), for an example of this tendency.
6. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 55.
7. Pierre Bourdieu, "Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction," in Family and Society: Selections from the Annales, ed. Robert Foster and Orest Ranum, trans. Elborg Foster and Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 141.
8. Virginia Wright Wexman, Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5.
9. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 45. Giddens calls romance "the counterfactual thinking of the deprived."
10. Sharon Thompson, Going All the Way: Teenage Girls' Tales of Sex, Romance, and Pregnancy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 26.
11. Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 59.
12. Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 145.
13. duCille, The Coupling Convention, 14.
14. See William Jankowiak, ed., Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
15. Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992), 19-58.
16. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, rev. ed., trans. Montgomery Belgion (1956; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).
17. Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter-Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) shows that the connection between romantic love and marriage is a feature specific to English and American fiction. Wexman, Creating the Couple, demonstrates that Hollywood films present us with a variety of conceptions of love and marriage, including not only patriarchal dynastic marriage and the more egalitarian companionate couple but also more radical alternatives, thus finding that love's various historical phases continue to live on in cinema. What Modern Love adds to the contributions of these studies is the treatment of romantic love as a discourse that has itself undergone historical change and the identification of intimacy as a new discourse.
18. Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 130.
19. Paul Veyne, A History of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 40.
20. See María-Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 142-52, for an extended reading of Layla and Majnun that explores its historical influence up through Eric Clapton.
21. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 10.
22. Georges Duby, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 2, Revelations of the Medieval World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 145.
23. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, ed. John Jay Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 100.
24. Boone, Tradition Counter-Tradition, 34.
25. Duby, History of Private Life, vol. 2, 82.
26. The long history of debate among medievalists includes, on the one hand, C. S. Lewis's The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938)
27. which argues that courtly love is about adultery, and, on the other hand, E. Talbot Donaldson's "The Myth of Courtly Love," in Speaking of Chaucer (London:Athlone Press, 1970)
28. Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World, which hold that it is about unfulfilled desire. More recent studies have argued for some middle position.
29. See Boone, Tradition Counter-Tradition, 34-43.
30. Donald Maddox, "Triadic Structure in the Lais of Marie de France," Assays 3 (1985): 22-29.
31. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971), 204.
32. Lawrence Stone, "Passionate Attachments in the West in Historical Perspective," in Passionate Attachments: Thinking about Love, ed. William Gaylin and Ethel Person (New York: Free Press, 1988), 20.
33. Richard Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1996), 134.
34. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 99-105;
35. David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 261.
36. Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 174-89.
37. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 41.
38. Luhmann, Love as Passion, 63.
39. Stone, "Passionate Attachments," 18-19.
40. See Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic, 1984)
41. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart:Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:Oxford University Press, 1989), for such evidence.
42. Luhmann, Love as Passion, 129, 150.
43. See Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage; Boone, Tradition Counter-Tradition; Luhmann, Love as Passion; and Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy.
44. John R. Gillis, "From Ritual to Romance: Toward an Alternative History of Love," in Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory, ed. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns (New York: Holmes, 1988), 87-121.
45. Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2.
46. See Ernest R. Mower, Family Disorganization: An Introduction to Sociological Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927)
47. Ernest W. Burgess, "The Romantic Impulse and Family Disorganization," Survey 57 (1926): 290-94.
48. Francesca M. Cancian, Love in America: Gender and Self-Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 17.
49. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 52, 24-25.
50. Francine Klagsbrun, Married People: Staying Together in the Age of Divorce (1985; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1986), 21.
51. On the commodification of romance, see Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1997).
52. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957; reprint, London: Hogarth Press, 1987), 205.
53. See Watt, Rise of the Novel; Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter-Tradition:Love and Form in Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1987);
54. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);
55. Evelyn J. Hinz, "Hierogamy versus Wedlock: Types of Marriage Plots and Their Relationship to Genres of Prose Fiction," PMLA 91 (1976): 900-13;
56. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
57. On the fairy-tale qualities of Pride and Prejudice, see Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women: Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 73-92.
58. The historical romances discussed in this chapter are Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (New York: Harper, 1880);
59. Charles Major, When Knighthood Was in Flower (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merill, 1898);
60. Edward Noyes Wescott, David Harum (New York: Appleton, 1899);
61. Paul Leichester Ford, Janice Meredith (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900);
62. Winston Churchill, Richard Carvel (New York: Macmillan, 1900);
63. Winston Churchill, The Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1901).
64. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 311-13.
65. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1988), 17.
66. William Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," Harper's Monthly 74 (April 1887): 824.
67. John Tebbell, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: Bowker, 1975), 170, 171, italics in original.
68. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 45-54;
69. David R. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 26-40.
70. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996), 297-339, read "all of the stories in the same volumes" of these periodicals from 1895 to 1897 and from 1902 to 1903 and found that over one hundred of the nearly two hundred stories fit the courtship formula (297).
71. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1954), 163.
72. For examples of such instruction, see J. H. Kellogg, Plain Facts for Young and Old (1877; reprint, New York: Arno, 1974);
73. Sylvannus Stall, What a Young Man Ought to Know (Philadelphia: Vir, 1904);
74. Mary Wood-Allen, What a Young Woman Ought to Know (Philadelphia: Vir, 1905).
75. Robert A. Lively, Fiction Fights the Civil War: An Unfinished Chapter in the Literary History of the American People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 57. These banal but affirmative descriptions disguise the racism that the rehabilitation of the South entailed. The vision of "healed wounds" and sectional "reunion" asked Northerners to embrace Southern whites as brothers and to ignore the continuing oppression of blacks.
76. William Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," Harper's Monthly 76 (December, 1887): 11-12.
77. This reading of the triangle has been given its most familiar exposition in René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1-52. In spite of the subtitle, triangular desire is treated here as a figural element of novels, rather than as proper to their narrative structure. For other readings
78. see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), who reads it as expressing otherwise repressed homoerotic desire
79. Peter Gay, The Tender Passion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 131-32), who sees it as a reflection of the Oedipal triangle.
80. See Donald Maddox, "Triadic Structure in the Lais of Marie de France," Assays 3 (1985): 22-29.
81. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 39-40.
82. Karen Tracey, "'Little Counterplots' in the Old South: Narrative Subterfuge in Caroline Hentz's Domestic Fiction," Journal of Narrative Technique 28 (Winter 1998): 1-20.
83. Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families 1600-1900 (New York: Verso, 1988), 251-86.
84. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 107-8.
85. The repetition of this anachronism may also be explained by Pierre Bourdieu's point in "Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction," in Family and Society: Selections from the Annales, ed. Robert Foster and Orest Ranum, trans.
86. Elborg Foster and Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 141, that matrimonial choice can never be absolutely free since the constraints involved are too numerous and complex to be mastered by the conscious, rational mind.
87. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution (1970; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1972), 146.
88. See Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984);
89. Jean Radford, ed., The Progress of Romance:The Politics of Popular Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1986).
90. Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 39-40.
91. R. W. B. Lewis, introduction to The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton (Boston: Houghton, 1963), vi.
92. Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 59.
93. Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 12.
94. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in The Works of Mark Twain, vol. 4 (1876; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 237.
95. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920; reprint, New York:Macmillan, 1993), 43-44.
96. On identification and point of view in Hollywood cinema, see Robert Ray's discussion of Casablanca in A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 48-54.
97. Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 150.
98. R. W. B. Lewis, introduction to The Age of Innocence (New York:Macmillan, 1993), xvi.
99. Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 75-76.
100. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner's, 1925), 14.
101. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 316.
102. Scott Donaldson, Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Congdon, 1983).
103. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 14.
104. Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 59.
105. Elinor Glyn, The Philosophy of Love (New York: Authors' Press, 1923), 197.
106. Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 65-91.
107. Pamela S. Haag, "In Search of 'The Real Thing': Ideologies of Love, Modern Romance, and Women's Sexual Subjectivity in the United States, 1920-40," Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1992): 548.
108. Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 15.
109. John C. Spurlock, "Problems of Modern Married Love for Middle-Class Women," in An Emotional History of the United States, ed. Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 325.
110. Francesca M. Cancian, Love in America: Gender and Self-Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 34, quoting Ernest Burgess.
111. Spurlock, "Problems," 320.
112. Ben B. Lindsey and Wainright Evans, The Companionate Marriage (1927; reprint, New York: Arno, 1972), v.
113. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper, 1988), 265-66.
114. Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 69, 75-76.
115. Ernest W. Burgess, "The Romantic Impulse and Family Disorganization," Survey 57 (1926): 290-94;
116. Ernest R. Mower, Family Disorganization: An Introduction to Sociological Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927).
117. Ernest R. Groves, The Marriage Crisis (New York: Longmans, 1928), 46.
118. See also Sylvester Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity (Boston:Charles Pierce, 1848)
119. Sylvannus Stall, What a Young Man Ought to Know (Philadelphia: Vir, 1904), 203, who urges that a wife be selected on the grounds of her health and abilities as a housekeeper, and counsels, "Don't fall in love." 21. Cancian, Love in America, 29.
120. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 36-37, quoting Orson Fowler, Love and Parentage (1856).
121. Seidman, Romantic Longings, 47.
122. Mary Wood-Allen, What a Young Woman Ought to Know (Philadelphia:Vir, 1905), 205.
123. Seidman, Romantic Longings, 50.
124. Glyn, The Philosophy of Love, 47.
125. Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 130.
126. May, Great Expectations, 71. This view is often repeated in advice literature of the period. See
127. e.g., Laura Hutton, The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems (1935; reprint, Baltimore: William Wood, 1937), 25.
128. Marie Carmichael Stopes, Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties (1918; reprint, New York: Eugenics Publishing, 1931), 116, 160.
129. Glyn, The Philosophy of Love, 14-15.
130. Seidman, Romantic Longings, 84.
131. Lesley A. Hall, "Uniting Science and Sensibility: Marie Stopes and the Narratives of Marriage in the 1920s," in Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals:British Women Writers, 1889-1939, ed. Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 128.
132. Stopes, Married Love, 2.
133. Marie Carmichael Stopes, Enduring Passion: Further New Contributions to the Solution of Sex Difficulties, Being the Continuation of Married Love (London: Putnam, 1928), v, italics mine.
134. Joan Hardwick, Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn (London: André Deutsch, 1994), 63.
135. Elinor Glyn, Three Weeks (1907; reprint, New York: Macaulay, 1924), 5-6.
136. Hardwick, Addicted to Romance, 117.
137. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996), 175-218.
138. May, Great Expectations, 63-67.
139. Glyn, The Philosophy of Love, 214.
140. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5.
141. Dix quoted in May, Great Expectations, 70.
142. Glyn, The Philosophy of Love, 62.
143. Stopes, Enduring Passion, 12-13.
144. This is true of earlier advisers, such as Kellogg and Stall as well as later ones, e.g., Ernest R. Groves, Marriage (New York: Holt, 1933).
145. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 58.
146. It is worth remembering, however, as Cancian reminds us, that the actual course of most marriages during this period did not conform to the model that Glyn and Stopes proposed, and that a "family ideal" continued to be endorsed by many social scientists (Love in America, 35-37).
147. D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 266.
148. Groves, The Marriage Crisis, 194-95.
149. For a brief but thorough account of the conventions of screwball comedy, see Tina Olsen Lent, "Romantic Love and Friendship: The Redefinition of Gender Relations in Screwball Comedy," in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1995), 327-28.
150. Scholars have had a difficult time defining screwball comedy. For discussions of this difficulty, see Wes D. Gehring, Screwball Comedy: A Genre of Madcap Romance (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 3-12;
151. Thomas Schatz, Old Hollywood/New Hollywood: Ritual, Art, and Industry (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983), 94-97, 158-63;
152. Brian Henderson, "Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?" in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1986), 311-13.
153. James Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges (New York: Knopf, 1987), on the other hand, simply identifies screwball comedy as romantic comedy during Hollywood's classic period (xi-xii). For my purposes, it is important that screwball comedy is a recognizable kind of Hollywood product distinct from other versions of romantic comedy.
154. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 85.
155. Stanley Cavell, "Two Cheers for Romance," in Passionate Attachments:Thinking about Love, ed. William Gaylin and Ethel Person (New York: Free Press, 1988), 85-100.
156. According to Sturges's biographer, Sturges did not see The Lady Eve as a critique of romantic love but rather as "a paean to the mysterious compulsion and mixed motives that, rather than certitude, propel romantic love."
157. Diane Jacobs, Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 239.
158. See, e.g., Colin McCabe, "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure," Screen 17, no. 3 (1976): 11-29;
159. Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981);
160. John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
161. On Hollywood's "invisible style," see Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 32-55.
162. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 16. Their study of an "unbiased sample" of one hundred Hollywood films made between 1915 and 1960 showed eighty-five to have heterosexual romantic love as the leading line of action. Of course, some studioera films, such as Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1939), depict romantic love critically or unromantically. Others, as Virginia Wright Wexman has shown, depict marriage in terms of social conventions that differ from those dominant in twentieth- century America.
163. Virginia Wright Wexman, Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993; see esp. 39-129).
164. D. W. Griffith's melodramas, such as Way Down East (1920), represent more traditionally patriarchal marriages and families than do most Hollywood films. In many Westerns, such as Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) and The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), a focus on issues of inheritance or "blood" ties implies the residual conventions of marriage as alliance.
165. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5;
166. Slovoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 29.
167. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1954), 163.I owe this point to James Naremore.
168. Woody Allen, "Interview," Rolling Stone, no. 665 (September 16, 1993):50.
169. See John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
170. Wexman, Creating the Couple, 32.
171. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 49, 88.
172. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 182.
173. Harvey, Romantic Comedy, 381.
174. "Bliss of genitality" is a paraphrase of Eric Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1963), 264. Erikson argues that genitality, as the stage of true sexual maturity, is misunderstood as a permanent state of sexual bliss. Nevertheless, Erikson seems to contribute to this vision of heterosexual paradise when he calls genitality the "utopia" of his system (92).
175. Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 106.
176. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 85.
177. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, rev. ed., trans. Montgomery Belgion (1956; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 32-34.
178. Lent, "Romantic Love and Friendship," 320, 323.
179. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 186.
180. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 152.
181. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 90, makes much of Gable's being "parental" in It Happened One Night but fails to see any connection between being parental and patriarchy.
182. Dana Polan, "The Felicity of Ideology: Speech Acts and the 'Happy-Ending' in American Films of the Forties," Iris 3 (1985): 36.
183. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 191.
184. Diane Carson, "To Be Seen and Not Heard: The Awful Truth," in Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R. Welsch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 216.
185. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 8.
186. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution (1970; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1972), 146.
187. Kathleen Rowe, "Comedy, Melodrama and Gender: Theorizing the Genres of Laughter," in Karnick and Jenkins, Classical Hollywood Comedy, 39-59.
188. Casablanca and Gone with the Wind were ranked first and second respectively in the American Film Institute's list of the hundred greatest love stories. See www.afi.com/tv/passions.asp.
189. John Housely, "A Fine Romance: Ten Best," Premiere 5 (Feb. 1992): 96;
190. Leonard Maltin, "Leonard Maltin's Ten Most Romantic Movies," Ladies Home Journal 110 (Feb. 1993): 66.
191. It has been argued that Gone with the Wind is a tragedy. See Trisha Curran, "Gone with the Wind: An American Tragedy," Southern Quarterly 19, nos. 3-4 (1981): 47-57.
192. The terms outlaw hero and official hero are found in Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 58-66.
193. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 96-97.
194. Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 129, 150.
195. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, rev. ed., trans. Montgomery Belgion (1956; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 15.
196. Aljean Harmetz, Round up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca-Bogart, Bergman, and World War II (New York: Hyperion, 1992), 172-78.
197. Ray, A Certain Tendency, 89-112.
198. Ray's argument owes a great deal to Leslie Fiedler's in Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), though Ray does not emphasize the homoerotic as Fiedler does.
199. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 14.
200. See Ray, A Certain Tendency, 48-55, for a detailed analysis of the way Casablanca builds identification with Rick.
201. Sigmund Freud, "The Finding of an Object," in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, standard ed., vol. 7, ed. and trans. James Strachey (1905; reprint, London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 222-30;
202. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (1921; reprint, New York: Norton, 1961), 10-25.
203. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Decline in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 166-67.
204. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 109.
205. Helen Taylor, Scarlett's Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 94-96.
206. Jan Cohn, Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), 148.
207. See John C. Spurlock, "Problems of Modern Married Love for Middle-Class Women," in An Emotional History of the United States, ed. Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York: NYU Press, 1998); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
208. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper, 1988). There is a sense in which the narrative seems to want to have it both ways, however. Melanie and Ashley are cousins, and we are told that the Wilkeses always marry within the family. This smacks of arranged marriage with the best face put on it. Moreover, Rhett's marital rape of Scarlett might be seen as the return of the repressed patriarchal model of marriage, the model that would have been dominant in the time and place the film depicts.
209. Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford, England:Blackwell, 1994), 12. Lacanian theory makes the perpetual deferral of the satisfaction of desire a constant of human nature, a fact seemingly or explicitly ignored by many of the poststructuralist critics who invoke it. In one sense, of course, this theory is merely a tautology. Desire is by definition only desire so long as it remains unsatisfied. When the term is used by Lacan or by Barthes and those they have influenced, however, it becomes synonymous with love or sex or both. This identification of desire and love should be historicized as part of the discourse of romance. While Belsey takes Lacan to explain the appeal and the meaning of texts like Gone with the Wind, I want to suggest that both Lacan's theory and the narrative texts in their different ways embody similar cultural assumptions. Both take love to be defined by its obstacles and thus in principle to be brief and unsatisfying.
210. Cohn, Romance, 163, describes Rhett as the source for the "nurturing hero" of formula romances. On the women's romance formula
211. see also Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
212. Belsey, Desire, 41.
213. William H. Masters, Virginia E. Johnson, and Robert C. Kolodny, Heterosexuality (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 16.
214. On the relationship between romance and consumption, see Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
215. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 20.
216. Earl Lomon Koos, Marriage (New York: Holt, 1953), 244-45.
217. For other examples of textbooks, see Judson T. Landis and Mary Landis, Building a Successful Marriage (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948);
218. Howard Becker and Reuben Hill, eds., Family, Marriage and Parenthood, 2d ed. (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1955);
219. Ruth Shonle Cavan, American Marriage: A Way of Life (New York: Crowell, 1959). Beneath the surface of the 1950s, changes were brewing.
220. See Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988);
221. Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media (New York:Times, 1994);
222. Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986).
223. Maggie Scarf, Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage (1987; reprint, New York: Ballantine, 1988), 109. Italics in original, quoting Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.
224. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 17.
225. Scarf, Intimate Partners, 115.
226. Francine Klagsbrun, Married People: Staying Together in the Age of Divorce (1985; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1986), 311.
227. Pepper Schwartz, Peer Marriage: How Love between Equals Really Works (New York: Free Press, 1994), 4-5.
228. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978);
229. Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
230. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
231. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 8. For another account of these changes
232. see Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs, Re-Making Love.
233. Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 58.
234. Klagsbrun, Married People, 21.
235. Thomas Moore, Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 23.
236. Scarf, Intimate Partners, 141-42.
237. Klagsbrun, Married People, 9.
238. Aaron T. Beck, Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstandings, Resolve Conflicts, and Solve Relationship Problems through Cognitive Therapy (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 188.
239. Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: Morrow, 1990), 98.
240. Augustus Y. Napier, The Fragile Bond: In Search of an Equal, Intimate, and Enduring Marriage (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 222.
241. Beck, Love Is Never Enough, 188.
242. Scarf, Intimate Partners, 142, italics in original.
243. Klagsbrun, Married People, 20.
244. Scarf, Intimate Partners, 402.
245. Klagsbrun, Married People, 21, quoting Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society.
246. Scarf, Intimate Partners, 141.
247. Barbara De Angelis, How to Make Love All the Time (1987; reprint, New York: Dell, 1988), 234, 238-40, italics in original.
248. Scarf, Intimate Partners, 61-74.
249. Napier, Fragile Bond, 97.
250. De Angelis, How to Make Love, 55.
251. Scarf, Intimate Partners, 207.
252. Schwartz, Peer Marriage, 92, 15.
253. Klagsbrun, Married People, 10.
254. Scarf, Intimate Partners, 13.
255. Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
256. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1954), 134.
257. Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories (New York: Macmillan, 1963).
258. Cover blurbs describe Klagsbrun's Married People as "riveting" and Napier's The Fragile Bond as "compelling." 49. Moore, Soul Mates, 40.
259. Tannen, You Just Don't Understand, 49-61.
260. John Gray, Mars and Venus in Love: Inspiring and Heartfelt Stories of Relationships That Work (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).
261. Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 184.
262. Tannen, You Just Don't Understand, 283.
263. John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationship (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 10.
264. Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 182.
265. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
266. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 58-65.
267. Pauline Kael, Reeling (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 408.
268. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 130.
269. Adam Gopnik, "The Outsider," New Yorker, October 25, 1993, 92.
270. Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 112-52.
271. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 15, italics in original.
272. Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 72.
273. Richard Hauer Costa, Alison Lurie (New York: Twayne, 1992), 13.
274. Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 15.
275. Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter-Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 124. There is no actual adultery in A Modern Instance, but it is an issue because Bartley appears to his wife and others to have been unfaithful.
276. Allen F. Stein, After Vows Were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 31. Stein claims that Howells, James, Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Robert Herrick produced "marriage fiction" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (3), but his argument actually supports my own, since he sees these authors as mainly treating marriage for its social significance.
277. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992)
278. Boone, Tradition Counter-Tradition.
279. Henry James, "The Art of the Novel," in Henry James: The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage, 1956), 8.
280. Kern, The Culture of Love, 361.
281. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; reprint, New York: Harcourt, 1955), 262.
282. As a result, it is now possible to advocate adultery. See Laura Kipnis, "Adultery," Critical Inquiry 24 (Winter 1998): 289-327, for the academic version
283. Dalma Heyn, The Erotic Silence of the American Wife (New York:Turtle Bay, 1992), for a popular example.
284. Maggie Scarf, Intimate Matters: Patterns in Love and Marriage (1987; reprint, New York: Ballantine, 1988), 402.
285. John Updike, "More Love in the Western World," review of Love Declared, by Denis de Rougemont, in Assorted Prose (New York: Knopf, 1965), 289.
286. Francine Klagsbrun, Married People: Staying Together in the Age of Divorce (1985; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1986), 79, quoting family therapist Salvador Minuchin.
287. John Updike, "One Big Interview," in Picked-Up Pieces (New York:Knopf, 1975), 497.
288. John Updike, "Howells as Anti-Novelist," in Odd Jobs (New York:Knopf, 1991), 189.
289. Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia:W. B. Saunders, 1948)
290. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953);
291. Shere Hite, The Hite Report (New York:Macmillan, 1976)
292. The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (New York: Knopf, 1981);
293. Robert T. Michael et al., Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (Boston:Little, Brown, 1994).
294. Roger Ebert, review of An Unmarried Woman, in Cinemania 97, CDROM (Seattle: Microsoft, 1996).
295. Tamar Liebes and Sonia Livingstone, "The Structure of Family and Romantic Ties in the Soap Opera: An Ethnographic Approach," Communication Research 21 (1994): 725.
296. Sharon Thompson, Going All the Way: Teenage Girls' Tales of Sex, Romance, and Pregnancy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 41.
297. David Kendall, interview, in Making and Selling Culture, ed. Richard Ohmann et al., (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 66.
298. For an example of a Christian fundamentalist use of the discourse of intimacy, see David Ferguson et al., The Pursuit of Intimacy (Nashville, Tenn.: Nelson, 1993). For the complex ways these discourses can mix in practice
299. see Judith Stacey, Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
300. Linda Singer, Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic (New York: Routledge, 1993), 180.
301. Ephron wrote the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally, another example of the "delayed fuck."
302. Judith Wallerstein, Julia Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study (New York: Hyperion, 2000).
303. Andrew J. Cherlin, quoted in Elisabeth Bumiller, "Resolute Adversary of Divorce," New York Times, December 16, 2000, B11.
304. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York:Free Press, 1992)
305. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995).
306. National Marriage Project, "The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America," July 1, 1999, retrieved from http://marriage.rutgers.edu/.
307. Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992), 103, italics in original.
308. National Marriage Project, "The State of Our Unions."
309. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 214, 215.
310. Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14.
311. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985).
312. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
313. Jane Smiley, "Why Marriage? Matrimony at the Millennium Offers Solace to Capitalism," Harper's 300 (June 2000): 151.
314. Smiley, "Why Marriage," 154.